


Recognition

by thepointoftheneedle



Series: Recognition [1]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Implied Sexual Content, Jurisprudence student Betty, Making Up, Swearing, argument, lit student Jughead, the sweater one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22860982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: It can be hard, starting out, when you are young and money's tight and you come from very different families.  Betty and Jug have to start negotiating a way to live together.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Series: Recognition [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1844407
Comments: 26
Kudos: 112
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Recognition

**Author's Note:**

> Setting- an auditorium, an empty stage, podium, screen to the left showing the D&D alignment grid.  
> Enter stage right a figure carrying a pointer.  
> Good evening everyone. I am thepointoftheneedle’s inner geek. Thank you for coming to my talk on Bughead and the D&D alignment system.  
> I think we are probably in some degree of consensus with regard to Jughead’s alignment. While some have, in the past, considered him an agent of chaos, in recent years his willingness to risk his safety, his very life, in order to be part of a strictly regulated group with laws and rules, regardless of the orientation of that group to notions of good and evil, shows that he is placed firmly here, (points with stick) in lawful neutral. Remember how neat he kept his broom cupboard? I rest my case.  
> So we turn our attention to Betty Cooper, a more complex case. Many have assumed that a girl with a ponytail that neat must be lawful good and I would concur that Betty has a sense of right and wrong to which she adheres. However, to serve that idea of justice she is prepared to boil a teen in a hot tub and be OK with that. So good (Taps pointer on section of screen) but not lawful good. She will willingly take a lead role in a jailbreak or cheat the vote for prom queen if necessary to realise her aims. So, in conclusion I put it to you that Ms Cooper is chaotic good. Thank you for your attention.
> 
> So, inner geek gets this idea and then she makes me write a fic to show what it’s like for a lawful neutral and a chaotic good to try to live together. Don’t blame me, blame old Geeky Mcgeek over there. If you want a love song to go with this, try 02-75 by The Mountain Goats, which is where I got the title.

He came home to find the apartment in disarray, again. Their bedroom looked like a tornado had swept through it and snatched Betty away to Oz. Her shampoo had fallen over and slicked down the side of the bathtub onto the floor. The kitchenette was littered with eggshells and flour. There was a smear of butter on the refrigerator handle that made his hands greasy. The trash can was full to overflowing. “The joys of living with Betty Cooper,” he sighed, as he found a trash bag so that he could decant some of the garbage before taking it outside to the dumpster. 

Before they lived together he had always imagined that she was tidy and well organised. She always seemed so put together. Her school notes were always neatly written and highlighted, her cheer uniform so clean and pressed. He had felt like a slob when he sat next to her at lunch in sophomore year before they had started dating. She always smelled so fresh, like daisies and cut grass. He used to worry that he might not be so fragrant. It was hard to keep properly clean when he had nowhere to live. He’d been doing his own laundry for years but he couldn’t afford to do more than one load a week at the laundromat so he prioritised things that he wore next to his skin and let his jeans and flannels go longer between contacts with detergent, too long, he worried. He was ashamed of the trailer those first few times she came over because it was dilapidated and beat up but he made sure it was always clean. He didn’t own much so he took care of what there was. His books were alphabetised, his laptop on a higher shelf away from potential spills with a cloth over it to protect it from dust. His clothes were folded carefully and stored flat because he didn’t own an iron and it was the only way to avoid looking like an unmade bed. If he tore something or lost a button he had disciplined himself to mend it quickly. Rips and missing fastenings would mean that his grunge aesthetic would slip quickly into looking like a derelict. His clothes came from goodwill, always in blue, grey and black. They didn’t show the dirt and he had to be able to wash them together in the single weekly load. He bought seldom but he made each item last.

By contrast Betty’s mother laundered her clothes, many of them by hand. The washer and dryer were constantly whirring at Betty’s house. She had her coats dry cleaned with staggering frequency. She never had to worry that she would run out of shower soap and not be able to afford more so she used it with abandon. Her mother vacuumed her carpet and tidied her papers away and bought her new notebooks and coloured pens. Betty barely even thought about where these things came from. He remembered a conversation when they were newly intimate with each other when Betty apologised to him that her lingerie was not more enticing. “My mom buys it all. New sets at the start of each semester and in the summer. This is almost new and I can’t exactly ask her to let me start buying it from Agent Provocateur without having really awkward conversations.”

As she spoke Jug’s jaw dropped further and further. There were so many aspects of what she was saying that he couldn’t compute and his plight wasn’t helped by the fact that she was sitting on his bed in her bra and panties and all his blood had left his brain so …brain think…no so good…It seemed that Betty got a whole supply of new underwear at least three times a year and just threw away the old stuff. And it appeared that she was apologising to him because this underwear, this underwear that he would be tortured by in dreams for the rest of his life, wasn’t sexy enough. And her mother went into a shop and picked out this underwear for her daughter, these scraps of satin and lace that felt so smooth and cool under his trembling fingers and that Betty claimed weren’t sexy enough. Oh God if they were more sexy he would just fly off into space and explode like a firework. This all seemed to imply that Alice Cooper was in part responsible for the vision that was before him. And now Mrs Cooper was in his head which was not good.

So, as he grabbed the fresh trash bag and rolled up his sleeves, he focused on the fact that they came from very different worlds and that he was generally delighted to clean up after her because that meant she was his girl who lived in this apartment with him and who he got to hold at night and make love to in the morning and who cooked for him (messily) and looked at him like he was the answer to a young girl’s prayer.

But as he excavated he saw that most of the bag was full of fabric. Those kinds of soft, top end wools that all had different names that only people like Veronica seemed to use. Betty was throwing out sweaters, lots of them. He goggled at the thought of throwing out good clothes that someone could use. He pulled one of them from the heap. It was soft and blue and embellished with some kind of stitching. He vaguely recalled seeing Betty in it maybe once or twice. She was throwing barely used expensive clothing in the trash when they were living hand to mouth on what he earned at the library and her meagre pay checks from nannying and babysitting. His full ride certainly made things easier but there was her tuition to find, only a fraction of which Alice could pay. Charles helped a little but Betty wouldn’t take money from FP. “That’s for you and JB, Juggy” she insisted, even when she was hurting for cash. And now she was throwing out clothes that she could have sold or worn or even given to Goodwill. He rarely got mad with her. They seemed to live together without the normal tensions. He worshipped the ground she walked on and she saw him and understood him like no-one ever had before. Now he was mad. She had been profligate and careless and they couldn’t afford it.

Of course that had to be when she came home, a smile on her lips as she came into the room and a kiss for him as she went to put her bookbag down on the table. He couldn’t stop himself from waving the sweater he was holding under her nose. “What the hell is this Betty? What are you doing throwing out clothes when we don’t have the money to buy next semester’s textbooks? Are these out of style or something? You need to learn to live within our means and our means at the moment is squat.” Her smile disappeared from her face as he yelled at her and her jaw set into a determined line.

“Hey Jug? I have a suggestion for you too.”

“What?” He replied, still too loud.

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” She turned on her heel and stalked towards the bedroom. The door slammed behind her so loudly that the walls shook. Mr Sullivan upstairs would definitely be wanting “a little word” when Jug passed him in the hall next time. Last time it had done Jug’s ego no harm at all when the old guy had asked about Betty’s health because he always heard her crying out so loudly every night so he guessed she was in a lot of pain.

OK, so that could have gone better, Jug thought ruefully as he stared at the closed door. As the idea hit him that Betty was really mad with him, he began to rethink his earlier outburst. These were Betty’s clothes that she could dispose of as she chose. If they were in the trash there would be a good reason for it. She was not, and never had been, irrational. He thought he heard her crying and his whole body tried to turn inside out like an umbrella in the wind. He’d made her cry. He suspected that he might be a dick.

He tapped lightly on the door. “Betts? Betty? Can I talk to you?”

“Go away Jug. You’re a dick.” Ah, so he was at least right about that. 

“Betts I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was just upset about the waste.” He needed to stop talking now or he was going to make it worse. He didn’t stop. “And the mess. I was upset about the mess too. And how you just expect me to clean up like I’m your mother or something. And the trash. You never empty the trash. It’s like you think its a man’s job but I’m not emptying the trash with my dick so you could probably do it once in a while too.” Oh God he was yelling again. He was yelling at his crying girlfriend through a closed door. He was such an unbelievable tool. 

“Jug. Fuck off. I can’t talk to you at the moment or I’ll say something I regret. Just fuck off.” 

So Jughead fucked off.

He grabbed his jacket and his hat, picked up his backpack with his laptop in it and headed out to the diner two streets over. As he strode along he tried to marshall all the reasons that he was justified in being upset. Betty didn’t look after her things. She didn’t attach much value to her possessions so a broken phone screen or a coffee spilled on a keyboard just didn’t bother her. That was irresponsible. 

Now another part of his mind started to rewrite their relationship from her p.o.v. Perhaps she didn’t value things but she did value people. She treated him like he was the most precious thing on earth. She never neglected to tell him that she loved him and was thankful for him. She told him that she wanted him, desired him. She touched him like he was a sacred object. She sometimes said he had a magic tongue. He actually shook himself like a wet dog at the thought because it was too distracting. 

She valued her friends too. She called Veronica every day and she spoke to Archie at least three times a week. If it had been left to him they would be losing touch with them by now because he didn’t properly value people, the reveal for that being the scene (daytime, interior) where he yelled at her through a closed door as she cried, fade to black.

But she was messy. She left a powdery residue of some kind of make up all over the dresser, there was always a sort of greasy sheen on the bathroom door handle from lotion or something. And, Oh God, the bobby pins and hair elastics that were strewn in a trail behind her like confetti. He was always standing on them or finding them in coffee mugs or tucked inside books. Her cooking left carnage in its wake too. Dirty pans balanced on bowls in precarious towers. Flour dusted every surface and gravy found its way inside the cutlery drawer. She should clean up as she went, that would be much more efficient.

Of course, he could cook instead and everything would be as clean and tidy as he desired. But, oh no, he couldn’t cook at all could he? He’d never bothered to learn because as soon as he had a home with a kitchen there was Betty, feeding him delicious meals that she had thought about and planned and shopped for and chopped and stirred and tasted and finally presented to him with an uncertain smile until he told her it was delicious but never as delicious as her. And she left make up and lotion everywhere because she was making her skin as soft as flower petals and always looking so beautiful. She chose to share herself and all that beauty with him. He didn’t make a mess because he once he’d showered and brushed his teeth that was a wrap on his grooming routine. It would be pretty hard to leave a mess behind from that.

Of course it had to be the sweaters that caused the biggest fight he’d ever had with Betty. Those sweaters had always been nothing but trouble. He remembered being fifteen years old and not being able to move from behind his desk in the Blue and Gold office because she’d reached up to grab a file from a high shelf and he’d seen that strip of skin between her waistband and the hem of the soft wool and been instantly, humiliatingly, hard. He’d hated how it made him feel like an animal, like he was disrespecting her. He couldn’t stop wondering how it would feel to run his hands over all that soft, pastel hued warmth. Of course, as soon as he’d found out how that felt, he’d been imagining his knuckles rubbing against the wool from underneath, fingers against whatever she had going on under the knitwear. But then, one night at the trailer, she’d just pulled the sweater off and tossed it to the floor. From then on when she walked into a classroom he was picturing how her clothes would look in a heap next to his bed. The first time she’d blown him she’d grabbed her sweater and knelt on it to save her knees from the hard floor. Betty’s knees on a bunched up sweater, her breasts right there, where he could see them, touch them, and then her soft, hot mouth on him. Oh God in heaven, too much. The sweaters would be the death of him.

She didn’t take the trash out though. She just filled it and filled it until the bag was splitting so that when he took it out of the trashcan it burst and left congealed mac n cheese and old coffee grounds all down the stairs for Mr Sullivan to complain about.

The problem with this scene, the young writer mused, was that the male protagonist was totally unsympathetic. The reader would hate him. They’d be thinking “so this kind, beautiful, desirable, funny, smart woman who treats him like he’s her hero doesn’t take out the trash. Poor baby, how can he survive the trauma?” Jughead was fairly certain that he was the worst example of white, male privilege in Amherst, and that was certainly a big claim. 

Here was the diner. Coffee and pie awaited his pleasure but he knew that the pie would be as dust and ashes in his mouth and he had a nasty suspicion that that was as it should be. 

Jughead Jones was a total dick. Betty dug her toes into the bedside rug and pulled her mouth into a tight line to stop her chin from quivering. She dashed the back of her hand over her cheeks to wipe away tears and pulled her shoulders back. He was a dick, and she was a martyr to put up with him. Where did he get off yelling and lecturing her like she was a child and he was the responsible adult? If it was left to him they’d eat nothing but Doritos and take out, sleep on dirty sheets and never have a clean towel in the place. She was all that stood between him and living like a down and out. She’d been in such a good mood when she got home. Her paper on symbolic interactionism had kicked her butt for three weeks and she had been anxious about it ever since she submitted it but she had got her grade today and, suffice to say, her 4.0 was still intact. What Jug didn’t realise was how hard she had to work for that. She had always been a good student but her mind was doggedly analytic not creative. She had excellent recall and could pull together information, evaluate it systematise it and form a synthesis but that was labour intensive. In high school her neat folders and colour coding had meant that she was always on top of everything but in college there was so much more to read and understand and she often felt overwhelmed. For him high school was a boring waste of time. He’d got through it without ever really having to work, relying on intuition and imagination. Now the originality of his mind was allowing him to soar academically while she ploughed through book after dusty book. She was always rushing to the next study group or extra lecture and if that meant that she wasn’t always tidy, well at least she wasn’t failing out. And he chose today to rain on her parade with his bourgeois notions of fiscal responsibility. Yes, bourgeois, that’s exactly what he was. She’d remember that one for when he got back; that’d sting him. Dick.

But she wasn’t a jurisprudence student for nothing. If that was the opening argument for the prosecution the defence had a right to reply. She did make a lot of mess and she did often watch him clean up after her when she was too tired or too busy. He did it without complaint and smiled at her as he mopped the kitchen floor or came back upstairs to fetch a fresh garbage bag because the one he was taking out had exploded on the stairway. This was the first time he had complained. Then she remembered that his chapters were due to receive critiques today. Maybe he felt academic pressure too, of a different sort to be sure, but if it had been a bruising experience and he’d come back to chaos perhaps his outburst was more understandable. He was still a dick though. Objection, your honour, ad hominem.

She was angry that he had said she was wasteful too. The sweaters were a disaster but she wasn’t pleased about it herself. It was just impossible to handwash merino and cashmere and then spread them out flat to dry when they lived in a tiny one bedroom with barely room to put down a book. Dry cleaning was out of the question given their parlous financial situation so she had decided to risk it at the laundromat. It hadn’t gone well. She had used the lowest heat settings but what she took out of the dryer were a number of sweaters that would look fine on a seven year old but which would do little to protect the modesty of a voluptuous woman approaching twenty. They were felted and misshapen. Of course now she had time for reflection, she could see that it would have been wise to try the laundromat with just one item, but she simply didn’t have time to go back again this week and she was rushing as usual. So the sweaters were ruined but, as she had told herself, they were impractical anyway. Her mother had bought them as a kind of domestic goddess boast. She was telling the whole town that she had the time, energy and discipline to keep her perfect family bandbox clean and neat. These days Betty was more interested in having her achievements speak for her than her appearance. She would dare to leave her hair loose sometimes, wear track pants to the grocery store and she certainly wouldn’t apply make up if she was going out for a run, no momma, not even a slick of mascara. So she wasn’t being improvident when she threw the sweaters in the trash, she was ensuring she wouldn’t be arrested for indecency.

In continuance of her case she should also point out that he could be stingy. She knew that when they ate out he looked at the price column before he looked at what was on offer. He generally chose what was cheapest. He refused bacon in his burger and she suspected that he might one day get a tattoo that said “guac should be free.” She had seen him turn down the Ethiopian roast and stick to the house blend that he complained tasted like ditch water and feet to save thirty five cents. He was parsimonious and penny pinching. Now he was complaining when she threw away her clothes even though it had nothing to do with him. She had a feeling that he would be upset if she took to wearing t-shirts and flannels everyday like he did. She knew he appreciated what she wore by the way he was always trying to take it off. However, to be fair, which Betty tried to be, he always insisted that she ordered whatever she wanted at the diner. If he suspected that she had chosen something because it was cheaper he wouldn’t let it rest until he had upsold her. When he came back to the apartment with his ditchwater, house blend drip he brought a decaf vanilla latte with whipped cream for her. He’d always sacrifice his principles and pay for the guac, for her. So he wasn’t really miserly. He wanted to live within their means while still making sure she had as much of what she desired as he could possibly afford. He would go without, and make do, to ensure that happened. Tears pricked her eyelids as she recalled that the coffee shop down the street charged thirty five cents to put extra whipped cream in a latte. 

It was just possible that he wasn’t a dick. She thought about the way he looked at her like she was a miracle worker when she put a plate of spaghetti and meatballs in front of him and knew it was because he remembered what it was like to be hungry. He kept a notebook where he recorded their incomings and outgoings and made sure the rent money was accounted for so that they would never, ever be evicted because he had been homeless and he would never let that happen to her. Finally she remembered the start of the semester when, despite all of her best efforts, she had been six hundred dollars short for tuition. In torrents of tears she had told him that she would have to drop out for a year to get the cash together and he had told her not to worry and disappeared for two hours, returning with an envelope containing exactly six hundred dollars. He sold his bike for her. Jughead Jones was not a dick. He was the kindest, most generous, most loving man in the world and he had had a bad day and she had made it worse by being messy and careless and impatient. 

She couldn’t stop the tears now but it wasn’t rage anymore. She just missed him. She threw herself face down on the bed and sobbed into his pillow, clutching it to her as if it were him. To her surprise she felt his arms stretch around her enclosing her in his characteristic pine and woodsmoke scent. 

“Oh Betts I’m so sorry. Please don’t cry. It kills me. Tell me what I can do. How can I make it right?” She looked up and saw that he was crying too.

“I’m sorry. It was my fault. I should have been more careful and cleaned up. I messed up Juggie.” She put her head against his chest and held onto him so tightly that he was in danger of asphyxiating. He didn’t complain; what a way to go.

“Where did you go?” she asked later, sitting at the kitchen counter with glasses of water, when they had stopped ugly crying at each other.

“To the diner but I couldn’t face pie so I knew I’d have to come home and make it right. I’m really sorry Betts. I know I was a dick.”

“Jughead Jones couldn’t face pie. Has anything more out of character ever happened?” She was able to smile for the first time since they began yelling at each other.

“I hope that me being a dick was a little bit out of character.” he looked at her through that hank of dark hair that fell in front of his eyes because he knew what that did to her. She knew that he knew and she smiled at him conspiratorially.

She put her hand over his before she asked “How were the critiques?” 

He returned her smile ruefully. “They suggested that the world has probably heard enough from CIS, straight white guys and that, unless I had a really new angle, I should probably shut the hell up. Which hurt. Because it’s true. Because I agree. Because it’s hard to see how I can do anything much about it.”

“I could give Kevin a call. He always said that given the right circumstances…” she laughed.

“Oh good, Kevin.” replied Jughead drily. “No thanks Betty, you’ve ruined me for other guys.”

“Well darling. You will simply have to accept their challenge and be more original. In fact, scratch that, you just have to show them how original you are. Unique, distinctive, idiosyncratic, quirky…”

“Oh please not quirky. I despise quirk.”

“You are the perfect degree of quirk my only love. You are the perfect degree of everything and I have a little surprise for you.” She stroked her hand along his jaw and followed it with a kiss before disappearing into their bedroom calling back over her shoulder, “So, I shrank all those sweaters right?”

“Yeah, you said. What’s the surprise?”

Now she was speaking from behind the partially closed door, “Well there was just one that I thought would be OK for around the apartment. I’ll try it on and you can see what you think.”

When she stepped back out his mouth fell open and he blinked at her stupidly. The sweater she had saved was a fluffy, pink angora cardigan. She had taken off her bra and it was so tight that she could only secure one button. The stretched wool was pulling her breasts up and together so her cleavage was life altering. The hem had moved so far up that he could see what he had heard V call “underboob.”

She leaned on the doorframe and looked at him from under her lashes. “What do you think Juggie? Will it be OK for wearing at home or should I throw it out with the others?” 

“If that sweater ever leaves, you have to promise me that it will be in my cold, dead hand. Get over here and let me check the fit.”


End file.
